A week of fun

It's been nine days since I won the annual Crime Fiction Award of the Netherlands and it has been one long week of fun. The appartment was filled to capacity with flowers. The largest bouquet of peonies I ever saw was sent by Lira, the main sponsors of the award. Geerte and Peter sent a bunch of beautiful deep red long stemmed roses, I'm sure they were Baccarats. And there were many more. We ran out of vases and had flowers in buckets on the floor. It was great. Even today, a bouquet arrived from Marina. And for nine days there were articles in the newspapers and interviews on the radio. Yesterday there was an interview in NRC Handelsblad. I was quite pleased with it, especially with the heading: "In his actions man shows who he is". Not bad.
Later that day the government fell.
What can I say?
Wonderful.

Ilse in Australia

In a couple of days my niece, Ilse, is leaving for Australia. She'll be in Meekatharra, deep in the outback, doing something in the gold mine there (don't ask me what). She is one cool geologist and you can keep in touch with her geologising down there on http://ilseinoz.blogspot.com.

Uncertainties

Nobody is sure. Sometimes we all have our doubts. Do I actually exist or am I no more than a figment of someone else's imagination? And in the latter case, does that someone else exist or what? There is little certainty in life, except that I love it, most of the time. But loving something hardly proves a thing.
If that isn't enough, the prospect of a serious disease doesn't help things along. I went into hospital for a small operation to remove a couple of lymph nodes (about fifteen of them). All in all the operation took less than an hour. They shipped the little nodes off to a lab to find out if the cancer in the prostate had spread or not. It would take a week for the lab to find out.
I waited. I wasn't overly nervous, although I did feel my mind and body slowly retreating into an ever quieter state. But what struck me was the extra dimension of uncertainty. Not being 100% sure I exist, I was now confronted with the possibility that my uncertain life might not even be continued, cancer of the lymph nodes being - on the whole - a much worse deal than cancer of the prostate. And I am kind of fond of my uncertain life, whatever it is.
A week later the lab results came back and the lymph nodes were clean. So I stepped through the double uncertainty and came out with the absolute certainty that my prostate will be removed. Unless someone is imagining things.

Two weeks to p-day

P-day is when a surgeon will remove my prostate, and p-day is thursday the 13th of July. As Pogo would say: Friday the thirteenth is on a Thursday this month. I am not looking forward to the immediate future, but I'm counting on the somewhat further future to be okay, one way or the other. I'm messing with uncertainties here.

Ja! We liggen eruit!

Eindelijk. Kan al die oranje-merchandising-heineken-aanstel-ellende weer weg. Eigenlijk zou ik nooit meer iets moeten kopen van een bedrijf dat voetbal sponsort. Maar ja, dat is ook weer zo overdreven.

Mister Miller wins

De macht van meneer Miller, that is the title of the book that won me the Crime Fiction Award. The power of mister Miller. "It is a visionary book", one of the people at the reception said, and he is an authority. I didn't hear him say it, so I can't say who it was, but one of the jury members told me.
I smiled.
I'm still smiling.

Why do you write? (8)

... my publisher asked me.
What do you think?

Gouden Strop!!!!

...the annual Crime Fiction Award in the Netherlands: I won it two days ago. Yes! Never received so many compliments in such a short time. Wonderful. Should do this more often. Been on a cloud since. Voice is shot to hell.
Great.

Good nodes

Lab results of the lymph nodes were good. That means cancer hasn't spread. Phew! That is good news. Except that I still need the prostate operation, which is bad news. But it is less bad news than than it could have been. So, the good news is that the bad news isn't the bad news. Just great.
Now I wait for a slot in the operating theatre.

Why do you write? (7)

... my publisher asked me, and there isn't a simple, single answer. I write to tell a good story. That comes first and that puts me fair and square in the bracket of a genre writer. Thrillers, in my case. But that isn't the only answer. I also write to find out what I think. That sounds really dumb, I know, but that is the way my mind seems to work. If I don't write, my thoughts get stuck. I get stuck. I don't know why that is. Others can think without ever writing anything. I can't. I am hopeless in that respect. My memory is so bad, that I can never make any progress. I read a book and by the time I finish it, I have already forgotten what it was about. I'm not kidding. I have bookcases full of books that I have read, some of them more than once, and I haven't a clue what is in them.
Study is my big hang up. I can read most things and if I make an effort I can understand most of what I read. But I cannot remember it. I live in the hope (probably false) that I have subliminal memory (whatever that may be) and that I recognize what I know without consciously knowing that I recognize it.
Wouldn't that be efficient?
So I write to hang on to what is all around me, to remember and to understand. That is pretty basic stuff, andI am dependent on it. And while I write, these stories appear. Stories that come from anywhere and that go everywhere. These stories are vehicles, they get me from one place to the next, and I love driving, so I simply have to get in and move with them.

They have been in

Until a week ago I was unbroken, untampered with. That state of unruptured self has been broken: they have been in. And 'they' is the medical profession. I have been opened up and tampered with. Like I have lost a certain kind of virginity, you see, I had my first operation and it wasn't even a big one. In through the belly, whip out a couple of lymph nodes, close up the openings they made and that was it. I was in and out of the operating theatre in an hour. And now, a week later, the wounds have healed, I am up and about. The only thing that bothers me is a recurring numbness I feel in my upper left leg, as if it has gone to sleep or something like that. No big deal.
The bigger deal is yet to come, because nobody takes out lymph nodes just for fun. They were taken out to check if the cancer I have in my prostate has spread or not. That is the big deal, and either way I am in for further tampering with. But hey, what can you do, once you open the doors for others to come in you shouldn't be surprised if they want to come back.
And they will.
See what they find.